Yusei Oji (1959)

Prince of Space is an hour-long film from the Prince of Space television series. This 1959 kiddie film was complete with miniatures, bird-beaked alien villains with their kneecaps on their shins, a hero in a costume that looks like he asked his mom to make it the night before Halloween, and two annoying, I mean inquisitive little boys.

Ichiro and his friends Makoto and Kimi enjoy looking through Ichiro’s telescope. Ichiro’s father is in charge of the Maki Institute and developed a special rocket fuel that will enable interplanetary travel. Makoto and Kimi are the wards of shoe shiner Wakao. One night all television sets are taken over by Dr. Eggman, I mean Ambassador Phantom from Planet Silver who addresses Japan from his spaceship. He declares his imminent arrival, gives the address where he will land, and no one had better get in his way. A contingent of police, scientists, and reporters await him. Oh, and also Ichiro and Makoto. After the aliens vaporize a number of police leaving only their helmets, the Prince of Space arrives and drives the Phantom off. Not to be deterred, Ambassador Phantom devises an evil plan to obtain Dr. Maki’s rocket fuel recipe.

I know it was 1959 and this was a children’s film, albeit with a number of redshirt deaths, but the scientists said that Planet Silver was 305,000km from the moon. The moon is only 385,000 km from the Earth. A planet orbiting so close to Earth sounds like a doomsday film all by itself. Setting that small tidbit aside, if you look at this film from the eyes of children 10 years before the Apollo 11 landing, and in a much less connected world, it’s not that bad. The costumes, special effects, and acting were low budget enough to be hilarious for today’s kids and adults. But this film wasn’t created for us. I found the kids being around dangerous situations unthinkable, but remember equally implausible films/tv shows from my childhood. This film could have benefited from fewer military personnel, reporters, policemen--basically fewer stuffed shirt adults.

Having argued for leniency, Prince of Space wasn’t a measurably good film by any metric, but it was a capsule from a different time before CGI, where a superhero in a baggy costume could point a baton at an alien with a giant beak and utter the words, “Your weapons can’t hurt me!” unironically.

24 October 2025

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